A little company in Champaign, Illinois, called Archeophone specializes in preserving sound recordings from the acoustic era. The company recently released Debate ’08, a CD with 22 brief speeches by William Jennings Bryan and William Howard Taft, the Democratic and Republican nominees for president in 1908. The recordings, originally made on wax cylinders by Thomas Edison’s National Phonograph Company, consisted chiefly of excerpts from the candidates’ longer orations. They were the first ever made by presidential candidates.

It’s fascinating to listen to the actual voices of these men. The first surprise, for me, was that Bryan sounds nothing at all like Fredric March’s Bryan-inspired character Matthew Harrison Brady in “Inherit the Wind.” The second was that Taft, that great moustachioed mountain of a Republican, sounds much more conversational and at ease before the microphone. Today and Wednesday I offer a few passages from each candidate on issues of continuing interest. The reader may wish to compare these to the sort of oratory that is heard from the 2008 candidates.

On insuring bank deposits

Bryan:

Remedies appear as fast as evils are recognized, for laws are the outgrowth of conditions….In the fall of nineteen hundred and seven…when banks all over the country suspended payment on checks, the people at once realized the evils of insecurity, and there is a growing sentiment in favor of legislation which will guarantee depositors by requiring all banks to stand back of each bank. The government requires security for its deposits; why should not the individual depositor be protected?…This system [in Oklahoma] not only relieves the depositor from anxiety, but it protects the community from the business embarrassment that follows a bank failure, while the banks are more than repaid for the small tax upon them by the increased deposits that are brought from hoarding and hiding.

Taft:

The Democratic platform recommends a tax upon National banks and upon such state banks as may come in, in the nature of enforced insurance to raise a guarantee fund to pay the depositors of any bank which fails. The proposition is to tax the honest and prudent banker to make up for the dishonesty and imprudence of others….[T]he proposal would remove all safeguards against recklessness in banking, and the chief, and in the end probably the only benefit would accrue to the speculator, who would be delighted to enter the banking business when it was certain that he could enjoy any profit that would accrue, while the risk would have to be assumed by his honest and hardworking fellow….If the proposal were adopted exactly as the Democratic platform suggests, it would bring the whole banking system of the country down in ruins.

(The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was finally created 25 years later as part of the New Deal.)